The Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes (19 page)

In the present century, the debate about procedure continues to be waged in the US. During an execution in Florida in 2006, a fifty-five-year-old Death Row inmate had taken thirty minutes to die, after the administration of the prescribed cocktail of three lethal drugs. Following a challenge as to the constitutional legality of lethal injection, the Supreme Court called a moratorium on this form of execution but decided in 2008 that the method was not a “cruel and unusual punishment”.

As in many aspects of crime and punishment, the grim, gruesome and ugly feature side-by-side with practices that reduce proceedings to a farce. Gallows humour is not without foundation as William Shakespeare observed in his line in
Twelfth Night
that, “many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage”. And a Scottish judge is credited with the remark about a convicted felon that he would be “none the worse for a good hanging”.

The final journey made by Jack Alderman, whose crime was that he murdered his wife, took thirty-three years. That was the length of time spent on Death Row in Georgia, USA, before being executed in 2008. Appeal procedures by condemned murderers often mean extended time spent on Death Row in the hope of gaining a reprieve, while others, once sentenced, simply want to face the end quickly.

Steven Judy was one of those who walked willingly to the electric chair in 1981, refusing all attempts to seek a stay of execution. By contrast, John Spenkelink exploited every legal loophole available to him during the five years he spent on Death Row. He gained three reprieves but eventually died in the chair. He had some bitter things to say about capital punishment, which he believed was meted out disproportionately to people from poor backgrounds.

In some cases, death alone was not deemed sufficient punishment and judgment decreed that executed felons should forfeit their corpses to the surgeons for dissection. This was the ultimate fate of fourteen-year-old John Any Bird Bell in 1831 and, earlier in the same century, the body of Sylvester Colson, a mutineer convicted in Boston, USA, was subjected to galvanic experiments for no apparent good reason apart from dubious scientific curiosity.

William Kemmler was a pioneer of sorts, being the first person to be despatched in the newly invented electric chair in 1890. His death by “manufactured lightning” at Auburn Prison, New York, was one of many bungled executions using electricity. Things had not changed a great deal forty-six years later when Albert Fish, an odious child murderer, was seated in “Old Sparky” at Sing Sing and precipitated a short-circuit in the apparatus.

Stories with a happy ending are rarely the outcome of these final journeys. But John Lee, famous as “The Man They Could Not Hang”, survived three attempts to kill him in 1884. Another remarkable survivor was Anne Greene who was hanged at Oxford in 1650 and her body placed in a coffin ready for the undertaker. She startled all present by defying the rope and, apparently, rising from the dead.

The last laugh on the final journey surely belongs to Kenneth Neu who joked his way through his trial for murder in 1935. He kept up his entertaining ways while in the condemned cell and declared that he was as fit as a fiddle and ready to hang.

Gallows humour aside, it seems strange that the human ingenuity which can put a man on the moon and devise an internet cannot produce a humane and reliable method of judicially terminating life. Perhaps the simple solution is the obvious one, to abolish capital punishment worldwide as an out-dated and unworthy practice. The central proposition that killing people is the way to teach them it is wrong to kill seems an untenable paradox.

“I’ve Lived My Hell”

“For one time in my life I get something I want”, was twenty-four-year-old Steven Judy’s comment when he faced death in the electric chair. He declined to make any last-minute appeal against execution and resisted attempts by groups opposing the death penalty to halt proceedings.

Judy’s short life had been a violent one. At the age of thirteen he raped a woman and attacked her with a knife and axe. He was confined to a mental institution and was classed as a sexual psychopath. After his release, he embarked on a life of crime which, according to his own account, included numerous rapes, armed robbery and burglary.

His criminal career ended in April 1979 after he killed a young mother and her three children. Twenty-three-year-old Terry Lee Chasteen was driving her children to the baby minder in Indianapolis when another driver flagged her down, indicating there was something wrong with her car. She pulled over and the man offered to help her. He pretended the car was not safe to drive and offered to give the family a lift. Driving off the interstate highway, Steven Judy raped and strangled the mother in front of her terrified children who he later drowned in a nearby river.

Judy was quickly caught and put on trial for murder in Indianapolis. Aware of his violent impulses, he told the jury, “You’d better put me to death. Because next time it might be one of you or your daughter.” The jury responded by convicting him and he was sentenced to death in the electric chair.

Judy issued many statements from his prison cell, but none of them contained anything approaching remorse. He said, “I’m not sorry for the things I’ve done because I’ve lived my life the only way I knew how . . .” One of his lawyers found redeeming features in his personality and described him as likeable and intelligent.

His execution was scheduled for 9 March 1981, and it marked the first time a person had been put to death in Indiana for twenty years. Despite Judy’s welcoming words regarding his own demise, numerous groups were fighting hard to gain clemency on his behalf. And a fellow prisoner asked the Supreme Court to halt Judy’s execution on the grounds that if it went ahead it would endanger his own appeal.

Protesters outside Indiana State Prison staged a candle-lit vigil on the eve of execution. Some of them carried placards declaring, “Why do we kill people who kill people to show that
killing is wrong.” None of this had any effect on the man in the death cell. He was reminded that he could still gain a stay of execution if he changed his mind. He told reporters that he was looking forward to the execution to give him release. “I’ve lived my hell,” he said, indicating that death was what he wanted.

His wish was granted when 2,200 volts surged through his body on 9 March 1981 and he became the sixtieth person to die in Indiana’s electric chair.

Six Minutes To Die

Having spent five years on Death Row, during which he was granted three reprieves, John Spenkelink became the first man for twelve years to be executed in the USA against his wishes. The execution at Starke Prison, Florida in 1979 proved controversial, requiring three separate charges of 2,000 volts to kill the prisoner who took six minutes to die.

Spenkelink was a drifter who had been in and out of prison most of his life. While on parole in 1973, he encountered a hitch-hiker who, he claimed, forced him into a sexual act at gunpoint. The two men shared a room at the Ponce de Leon hotel in Tallahassee, Florida, and it was here that Spenkelink shot the hitch-hiker in the back of the head.

Following his conviction for murder and sentence of death, Spenkelink exercised every channel of appeal open to him during the time he spent on Death Row. Finally, on 25 May 1979, the Supreme Court authorized his execution to take place.

There were reports that angry inmates at Starke Prison rattled their metal mugs against their cell doors in a noisy protest at what was about to happen. Spenkelink was taken in manacles to the death chamber containing the electric chair. The executioner was apparently a volunteer, drawn from the prison staff.

Fortified with two shots of whisky, the prisoner was strapped into the chair and the switch was pulled. A doctor applied a stethoscope to his chest and determined that a second charge
should be delivered. When this failed to make death certain, a third charge was ordered. Official witnesses were treated to the sights, sounds and smell of smoke and burning flesh. One of those present was reported as saying, “It is un-Christian. It is barbaric.”

Following the chaotic nature of Spenkelink’s last moments, there were rumours that he had fought with prison guards on his way to the death chamber and was already dead or unconscious when he was put in the chair.

After a moratorium of fifteen years, Florida was back in the execution business. Opponents of capital punishment feared an upsurge of judicial killings. Spenkelink’s death raised many controversial issues, including the suggestion that convicted persons from underprivileged backgrounds attracted the greater number of death sentences. Spenkelink was often quoted as commenting, “capital punishment means those without capital get the punishment”.

Another issue was the conduct of the execution process, which had been particularly gruesome in Spenkelink’s case. This led in 1981 to an order to exhume his body in order that an autopsy could be carried out to establish whether he was indeed dead or unconscious at the time he was electrocuted.

“His Eye Did Not Quail”

John Any Bird Bell, aged fourteen, was convicted of murder in 1831 and publicly hanged before a crowd of 10,000 people at Maidstone, Kent in the UK.

On 4 March 1831, thirteen-year-old Richard Taylor was sent on an errand by his father. He had been instructed to collect a parish allowance due to his family. He had done this on numerous occasions and his habit was to safeguard the money by keeping the coins in his left hand on which he pulled a mitten.

When the boy had not returned by nightfall, his father went in search of him but he remained missing for many weeks. Then, on 11 May, a man out walking near Bridge Wood at Stroud, Kent, found his body lying in a ditch. Richard Taylor was dead from a stab wound to the throat. A search in the undergrowth nearby turned up the presumed murder weapon, a horn-handled knife. The mitten had been cut off his hand and the money was missing.

The knife was traced to the Bell family who lived in a poor house close to Bridge Wood. Fourteen-year-old John Any Bird was the owner of the knife. He and his eleven-year-old brother, James, were taken into custody. The coroner’s court decided that the dead boy’s body, which had been interred almost immediately after discovery, should be exhumed. The purpose was to search the clothing.

The two boys in custody were taken to the graveyard to witness the exhumation so that their reactions could be observed as possible indications of guilt. John Any Bird declined to take part in the macabre incident that followed. But his brother accepted the invitation to climb down into the grave and search the pockets of the corpse. No money was found, confirming that Richard Taylor had been robbed and murdered.

John and James appeared before the magistrates at Rochester when the younger boy made a confession. He said that he kept watch while John ambushed Taylor and robbed and killed him. The eleven-year-old said that they had noticed Taylor’s regular errand to collect money for his father and hatched a plan to rob him. For his part in the enterprise, James was rewarded with one shilling and six pence.

John Any Bird Bell was convicted of murder at Maidstone Assizes and, while being transported from the court to the prison, acknowledged his crime. He even pointed out a pond in which he had washed off his victim’s blood. The judge who sentenced him to death told him that his body would be given to surgeons at Rochester for dissection.

The Kent and Essex Mercury
reported that the execution on 1 August 1831 drew “an immense concourse of people to witness the sad spectacle”. Half an hour before the time of the execution, 10,000 people had gathered near the gaol. John Any Bird Bell had made a full confession to his crime on the eve of execution. Accompanied by the chaplain, he walked steadily
to the scaffold and it was reported that, “. . . his eye did not quail, nor was his cheek blanched”. After the rope was placed around his neck, he exclaimed in a loud voice, “All the people before me take warning by me!”

“. . . The Toes Moved Briskly”

When Sylvester Colson enlisted as crew aboard the US schooner
Fairy
at Boston in August 1820, it was for a voyage that turned him into a mutineer and murderer.

The tone of the voyage to Europe was set at the quayside before sailing when the ship’s mate, Thomas Paine Jenkins, had an argument with Charles Marchant, who was reluctant to take orders. Having loaded a cargo of timber, the
Fairy
slipped her moorings and headed out to sea under the command of Captain Edward Selfridge.

From the start, Marchant’s rebellious nature affected other members of the crew and he found a willing ally in Colson. They proved to be a troublesome pair, arguing with both the mate and the captain. Matters came to a head when Colson was caught asleep on duty. He and fellow crew member, John Hughes, complained that their watches were too long.

On the night of 24 August 1820, Colson and Marchant resorted to murder. When Hughes enquired as to the whereabouts of the mate he was told casually that both the mate and the captain had been killed and thrown overboard. Marchant had blood on his clothes and he and Colson made preparations to scuttle the ship.

On 29 August, once they had sighted the coast of Nova Scotia, the mutineers sank the ship and rowed ashore with Hughes and another seaman called Murray. They related an implausible tale to the captain of a US ship, requesting him to take them on to Halifax. At this point, Murray decided to inform on the mutineers and they were taken into custody by the Canadian police.

Colson and Marchant were returned to Boston where, in November 1826, they were charged with revolt, piracy and murder. They were tried separately and each was found guilty
and sentenced to death. Marchant escaped execution by taking his own life while Colson died on the scaffold. The bodies were taken to Harvard Medical School for anatomical examination.

In February 1827, the corpses were handed over to Dr John White Webster, who, in the fullness of time, would stake his own claim to criminal immortality. Webster was engaged in experiments with galvanic apparatus to observe reactions to electrical stimulation on the nerves and muscles. What happened next was reported in excruciating detail in the
Columbian Sentinel
on 3 February 1827.